SECRETS OF PAINT AND STAIN CHEMISTRY

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COUNTRY SKILLS

Mother's painter Gail Larroca applies tinted shellac to an alder wood cabinet door.

Safe and envinronment-friendly paints, stains, and strippers.

by John Vivian

In the early 1970s a young couple I know purchased a new kind of tool for removing the layer-on-layer of paint covering the woodwork of the old farm home they were restoring for their growing family. The gadget was an electric heat gun—a kind of souped-up hair dryer that softened and loosened the old paint so a putty knife could scoop it off like butter. The gun didn't set the paint alight or scorch the wood like a blowtorch, or create the sloppy mess of lye or the noxious odors of petrochemical strippers. And we all thought it was in perfect keeping with our newfound environmental consciousness.

But then their youngest son developed a persistent digestive upset that puzzled doctors till an old-time GP diagnosed it as "painters' colic." This is chronic, low-level lead poisoning once common among fine-art painters who shaped their brushes with lips and tongue, and unwittingly ingested toxic "red leads" and "white leads"—carbonates and oxides of lead that have been a major component in paints, putties, and topical ointments for centuries.

It took a while to isolate the source of the problem, but my friends finally (and broken-heartedly) had to conclude that they'd all been absorbing lead volatilized by the heat gun into a breathable aerosol that eventually settled on food, furniture, and playthings. Only the baby was small enough to present severe symptoms.

With medication and an end to heat-gun paint stripping, the boy recovered physically, but developed a mild learning disability that may or may not be a consequence of lead exposure. There is no way to know for sure.

There was less doubt about the cause of truly severe lead poisoning just then turning up among children from inner-city slums and rural centers of poverty. Far too many (underprivileged, often neglected) kids were absorbing disabling amounts of lead from paint chipped off woodwork inside and outside their old homes (as well as from tetraethyl lead in gasoline). The federal government moved quickly to eliminate lead from fuel and from paint products for use on, in, and around the home, and in public areas, as well as in glazes on cooking utensils and tableware, and finishes on toys and furniture.

Today, ever more local authorities are requiring lead paint in older homes to be covered overall, and to be stripped to bare wood to well above kid-level (inside and out) before the dwellings can be sold or rented to families with small children. Also, clean air-and-water and public health legislation is removing toxic and environmentally harmful complex-hydrocarbon-based solvents from paint and paint- and adhesive-removal products sold for consumer use. These solvents—once common in varnishes and enamels—include: toluene (tolulol), a component of tri-nitro-toluol (TNT); the carcinogen benzine that was used to make DDT; even the (once)-universal organic solvent acetone that is the feedstock for smokeless gunpowder. Needed by industry and professional painters, perhaps, but not the kind of stuff to be sitting on the paint shelf out in your garage or mine.

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